PlayStation 5 Slim Crucial 4TB T500 SSD Upgrade

While everyone’s still squinting at Sony’s graphics sizzle reel and comparison videos, hunting for something to justify the price of a PlayStation 5 Pro, I’ve spotted something else. The SSD.

At 2TB the Pro’s SSD represents an upgrade over the PS5 Slim’s 1TB, and it’s a much-needed upgrade to boot. I bought my PS5 only a few days ago, grabbed a Plus subscription for the “free” games, and on day two had all but exhausted my SSD’s capacity. Game filesizes are big now. When did that happen?

This begs the question, how long will the PS5 Pro’s 2TB really last? And if you’re not dead set on graphical fidelity, would that money be better spent upgrading your existing PlayStation to make storage no longer a concern?

I think so. Indeed the £300 or so gap between the PlayStation 5 Slim “digital edition” and its similarly digital Pro counterpart just so happens to be the right chunk of change to avail yourself of not one, not two, but four terabytes. 4TB of SSD upgrade! This handily leap-frogs the PlayStation 5 Pro’s measly 2TB, and sets you up for at least another few release cycles worth of new hotness… or, like me, a ridiculous collection of locally-installed games I’m optimistic about playing but never actually will.

If you ever do get the hankering to upgrade you’ll be able to swap your 4TB SSD into your new console and be… more Pro, for the ultimate PS4 Pro More Pro More Pro More Pro experience. And with any luck, maybe there will be a small dent in the steep price by then. Ha.

But what’s actually involved in the upgrade? How do you know which SSD to buy? Do you need to re-download all of your games? And will your save-games be safe? Strap in- I’m going to upgrade my PS5 and let you know-

Step 0: Pick Your Storage Device

Skipping ahead to the end of step 1, I’m going to reiterate… or perhaps iterate… that you should pick the largest capacity SSD you can afford. Upgrading an existing SSD is a lot trickier than simply installing your very first, and you will not be able to place the old SSD into an external enclosure to migrate your games and data onto the new one. There are plenty of ways to work around this, but they are either time-consuming, tedious, technical, or all three.

Aside from capacity, the biggest elephant in the room is compatibility. Fortunately Sony have laid out fairly straight-forward specifications for an upgrade SSD, and manufacturers have run with this to make upgrade options clear and concise.

For this article, Crucial graciously supplied me with their 4TB T500. A Gen4 PCIe 2280 (that’s SSD speak for 80mm long and presumably 22mm wide, but who’s counting) form-factor SSD. It touts 7000MB/s read and 6900MB/s write, exceeding Sony’s posted minimum requirements by a comfortable margin. The “with heatsink” option is the one you want, and Crucial link both this and the non-heatsink version from their PlayStation 5 SSD Upgrades page so be careful to pick the right one.

They also list some dinky 2230 SSDs but there is absolutely no reason why you would want these – their diminutive size does not translate to better heat dissipation and almost certainly doesn’t translate to better real-world performance in the PS5.

The 4TB option is great if you’re playing the long game with the PS5, but 2TB is quite reasonably priced at the moment and will bump your Slim to 3TB or a Pro to 4TB, some pretty respectable capacities… if you’re not a CoD player…

Step 1: Backups and Offloading

First off, the PlayStation 5 Slim and PlayStation 5 Pro storage is integrated and not directly upgradable. This is a good thing, since your first upgrade – installing a new SSD into an empty slot in your console – will come with virtually no hassle and you can skip or skim this section.

But what if you’ve already upgraded and you’re swapping out your existing SSD for a monster 4TB?

The good news is that your savegames, if you have a PlayStation Plus subscription…you do, if you’re planning to spend £270 on an SSD, right?… will be safely backed up to the PlayStation Cloud so you can leave them out of the equation. To make absolutely sure this is the case, close your open game and navigate into settings and choose Saves Data and Game/App Settings. From here pick the relevant section – Saved Data (PS5) for the sake of argument – and then Sync Saved Data. Finally you can “view Sync Status” to make sure each game has successfully synced.

While “The Cloud” should take care of things it wouldn’t hurt to back your saves up anyway and you can do this onto an external drive. The bad news is that a backup is intended to bootstrap a new games console or recover from a failure, rather than serve as a means to ferry savegames around. That means you can’t copy or backup individual savegames between your console and an internal drive… for those of us who remember managing memory cards on classic consoles this is a step backwards, but it is *sigh* what it is.

The other bad news is that games installed to your existing SSD can neither be backed up, nor recovered from the SSD once you’ve removed it. Sony’s own guide states “Games and apps saved in your extended USB storage or M.2 SSD storage aren’t included in backup data”. If you’ve filled an expansion drive already… you… are, if you’re planning to spend £270 on an SSD, right?… then that’s a fair chunk of re-downloading you might have to do. You can mitigate some of this by packing as many games as possible into your PS5s internal storage, or individually offloading them onto an external drive, but neither of these are great options.

If this is your first upgrade and you’ve just skimmed over the finer points above then perhaps take it as a gentle suggestion to: go big or go home. Grab the biggest SSD you’re comfortable with, because changing it later will be a hassle and because you can take it with you if (or when) you upgrade your console!

Step 2: Pop off those panels!

The PS5 Slim has four removable panels and while you need only remove one of them to access the SSD expansion slot it’s a lot easier to lay the console flat and work on it when it’s completely – for want of a better term – naked.

For the lazy way, however, orient your PS5 on the table with the sacred symbols (bottom corner) facing up and the PS5 logo (top corner) facing down, and with the back edge of the PS5 facing towards you. The panel you want to remove is the top panel, which is a little tricky to budge. Sony’s own guide is a little thin on specifics with the phrasing “slightly lift the cover.” You will need more force than you might think, but pulling firmly and evenly until the clips relent should get you there.

Step 3: Install the SSD.

You will need a crosshead screwdriver. There’s a single screw securing the cover and another screw inside which secures the SSD into its slot. Remove the outer cover and put it, and the screw, somewhere safe- SSDs run hot and *two* covers are not going to do heat dissipation any favours. Undo the internal screw and be careful not to lose the little plastic riser. Set those aside.

Slot in the SSD by sliding it carefully into the connector and gently pushing it home. It should sit quite happily, held down under its own weight. Carefully slip the plastic riser underneath the end – it should line up with the second hole from the right and sit underneath the SSD, supporting the end – add the screw and tighten securely. Job done!

Step 4: Fire up your PS5

If everything went well, you should see an “M.2 SSD Storage” screen pop up on first boot, saying you need to “format” your SSD in order to use it. It’s a new, blank SSD so go ahead and pick “Format.”

This screen will also remind you that saved data, screenshots and video clips can’t be saved to the M.2 storage. If you’re running close to full, you’ll want to move some games.

Formatting will take a couple of minutes and your PS5 will give you a very crude performance summary. In my case it produced a read speed result of 6995 MB/s which is just 5 MB/s shy of Crucial’s touted figure and a comfortable margin above Sony’s 5500 MB/s minimum requirement.

Step 5: Move your games

You might be tempted just to forge ahead and enjoy your shiny new five terabyte console, but your Internal and Expansion storage are still separate with their own caveats. Notably your screenshots, video clips and savegames will always be stored internally and if you’re running close to capacity you’ll want to move games.

Fortunately moving data over is extremely quick, with my first mix of 168.8GB of games taking somewhere in the realm of 70 seconds to migrate. That’s roughly 2400 MB/s sustained read/write, which isn’t even half of Crucial’s theoretical maximum but plenty fast enough when taking into account whatever overheads the PlayStation might require.

You should also take a moment to change the new game install location – for both PS5 and PS4 titles – to your new SSD. Loading is fast enough that there’s effectively no difference between internal and expansion storage, so it’s handy to keep the internal storage free for the things that must live there.

Step 6: Install All The Things

With more space than you could shake a controller at, you can now sit back with “PS App” on your phone, browse the PlayStation Plus titles and install anything you think you might have a chance of someday wanting to play. Go ham! I have. With somewhere around 26 games currently installed onto the 4TB T500 I’ve not quite used a gigabyte… although at the rate I’m going I don’t think it will take long.

So far I’ve played and completed (the remastered) Legacy of Kain and (the more recent) God of War, with some decent progress through Ragnarok and plenty of other more suitable games shared with my kids (TrailMakers is a particular favourite). I haven’t noticed any performance dips, loading issues or hiccups though I’m left rather dazed that the largest SSD I currently own lives inside a games console. These modern shiny games are… quite big!

If we do, indeed, get Microsoft Flight Simulator on the PlayStation 5 then that SSD space might be even more essential!

Monday, March 10th, 2025, Computer Gaming, Playstation 5.